The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users by expanding the capabilities of mobile electronic devices. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to the delivery of services to a user of a mobile terminal. The services may be in the form of a particular media or communication application desired by the user, such as a music player, a game player, an electronic book, short messages, email, content sharing, web browsing, etc. The services may also be in the form of interactive applications in which the user may respond to a network device in order to perform a task or achieve a goal. Alternatively, the network device may respond to commands or request made by the user (e.g., content searching, mapping or routing services, etc.). The services may be provided from a network server or other network device, or even from the mobile terminal such as, for example, a mobile telephone, a mobile television, a mobile gaming system, etc.
Due to the ubiquitous nature of mobile communication devices, people of all ages and education levels are now utilizing mobile terminals to communicate with other individuals or contacts and/or to share information, media and other content. Additionally, given recent advances in processing power, battery life, and the availability of peripherals such as video/audio recording, mobile terminals are becoming prolific producers and consumers of media. Content sharing applications and platforms have been developed to enable the sharing of the content created by mobile terminals and other devices to a wide audience via the Internet using such mechanisms as My Space, YouTube and other popular content sharing mechanisms. More recently, even the ability to share live content has been developed. However, although the sharing of live content is currently possible, it is common for receivers of the content to manually locate and connect to sources of such content at fixed locations and/or times. Peer-to-peer (P2P) content sharing is also becoming more popular. However, P2P content sharing is often performed among close circles of contacts.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide an improved content sharing mechanism, which may overcome at least some of the disadvantages described above.